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Contents lists

T. E. Lawrence to Lionel Curtis

30.V.23

My Lord,

Your letter was black and white:- white because of that
Albright story. There seems a pitiful irony in my helping a mind
diseased. A hair of the biter? or was it the picture of a sickness
graver than his own? You know with neuroses the causeless ones are
worst. If my success had not been so great, and so easy, I would
despise it less: and when to my success in action there was added
(according to those whose judgement I asked) success in book-writing,
also at first venture - why then I broke down, and ran here to hide
myself.

Isn't it just faintly possible that part of the virtue apparent in
the book lies in its secrecy, its novelty, and its contestability? My
hard verdict upon it commands your sympathy? The hope that it isn't as
good as Shaw says sustains me... And the blackness of your letter?
Because it tempts me to run away from here, and so doing it marches
with all my wishes against my will. Conscience in healthy men is a
balanced sadism, the bitter sauce which makes more tasteful the ordinary sweets of life: and in sick stomachs the desire of condiment
becomes a craving, till what is hateful feels therefore wholesome, and
what is repugnant to the moral sense becomes (to the mind) therefore
pure and righteous and to be pursued. So because my senses hate it, my
will forces me to it ... and a comfortable life would seem now to me
sinful.

When I embarked on it, a year ago (it was June '22 that Trenchard
accepted me for the R.A.F.) I thought it a mood, and curable: while
today I feel that there is no change before me, and no hope of change.
That's why your suggestions of one hurt me.

Your arguments, while they make me very grateful to yourself, are
not heavy. I called you rich, once, in ideas and in furniture of mind:
and you are rich, relative to these poor fellows here. You say my
friends feel the absence of me - but personality (which it is my gift
to you to exhibit) is of a short range, and in my experience has not
touched more than ten or twelve friends at a time: and here I live
with twenty very barren men, who feel my being with them. The hut is
changed from what it used to be, and unlike what it would be (will
be?) if I left. This isn't conceit, but a plain statement; for there
would be a change if any one of us twenty was taken away: and I am
richer and wider and more experienced than any of the others here.
More of the world has passed over me in my 35 years than over all
their twenties put together: and your gain, if you did gain by my
return, would be their loss. It seems to me that the environment does
not matter. Your circle does not draw from me (except superficially)
more than theirs: indeed perhaps caenobite man influences as much as
man social, for example is eternal, and the rings of its extending
influence infinite.

For myself there are consolations. The perfect beauty of this place
becomes tremendous, by its contrast with the life we lead, and squalid
huts we live in, and the noisy bullying authority of all our daily
unloveliness. The nearly intolerable meanness of man is set in a
circle of quiet heath, and budding trees, with the firm level bar of
the Purbeck hills behind. The two worlds shout their difference in my
ears. Then there is the irresponsibility: I have to answer here only
for my cleanness of skin, cleanness of clothes, and a certain mechanical neatness of physical evolution upon the barrack-square. There has
not been presented to me, since I have been here, a single choice:
everything is ordained - except that harrowing choice of going away
from here the moment my will to stay breaks down. With this exception
it would be determinism complete - and perhaps in determinism complete
there lies the perfect peace I have so longed for. Free-will I've
tried, and rejected: authority I've rejected (not obedience, for that
is my present effort, to find equality only in subordination. It is
dominion whose taste I have been cloyed with): action I've rejected:
and the intellectual life: and the receptive senses: and the battle of
wits. They were all failures, and my reason tells me therefore that
obedience, nescience, will also fail, since the roots of common
failure must lie in myself - and yet in spite of reason I am trying
it.

Albright should have told his physician to heal himself... but yet
my best thanks for handing on the story. It cheered me a little bit,
as Brutus must have been cheered when the Roman gossip praised his
executed son.

This must be the end of egoistic writing: a safety valve may be
good for a boiler, in saving it from bursting - but it's an abuse of
it, to make it a pretext for habitually overloading the poor engine.
Wherefore apologies, and it shall not happen any more.

T. E. Lawrence chronology

1910-14: Magdalen College, Oxford (Senior Demy), while working at the British
Museum's excavations at Carchemish

1915-16: Military Intelligence Dept, Cairo

1916-18: Liaison Officer with the Arab Revolt

1919: Attended the Paris Peace Conference

1919-22: wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom

1921-2: Adviser on Arab Affairs to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office

1922 August: Enlisted in the Ranks of the RAF

1923 January: discharged from the RAF

1923 March: enlisted in the Tank Corps

1923: translated a French novel, The Forest Giant

1924-6: prepared the subscribers' abridgement of Seven Pillars of Wisdom

1927-8: stationed at Karachi, then Miranshah

1927 March: Revolt in the Desert, an abridgement of Seven
Pillars, published

1928: completed The Mint, began translating Homer's Odyssey

1929-33: stationed at Plymouth

1931: started working on RAF boats

1932: his translation of the Odyssey published

1933-5: attached to MAEE, Felixstowe

1935 February: retired from the RAF

1935 19 May: died from injuries received in a motor-cycle crash on 13 May

1935 21 May: buried at Moreton, Dorset

﻿

This T. E. Lawrence Studies website is edited and maintained by
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